Your favorite FTL Drive

[Hyper-Man]

How about enough Telekinesis to move the universe around you?

 

" I understand how the engines work now. It came to me in a dream. The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it."

    ―Cubert Farnsworth

 

HM

[dmjalund]

" I understand how the engines work now. It came to me in a dream. The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it."

―Cubert Farnsworth

 

HM

but if two vehicles try to use this drive at the same time, it could rip the universe asunder

[tkdguy]

Stutterwarp from the 2300 AD (aka Traveller 2300) game. Stutterwarp allowed travel of up to 3.5 light years in a day. However, after travelling 7.7 light years, a ship had to enter a gravity well and discharge the radiation that had built up. Failing to do so would prove fatal to the crew.

[Cancer]

Makes you nervous about exploring the Galactic Halo, that does.

[Zeropoint]

I had a thought about this once. Almost all fictional depictions of FTL drives require the ship to be away from gravity wells and massive objects. What if it were the other way around--what if a gravity well were required for a jump? After rolling that around in my head for a bit, I came up with the basic concept: the ship's jump is determined by the cross product of the local gravity and the ship's velocity relative to that gravity field, at the point in space and time when the jump drive is activated.

 

This has a few ramifications for travel. The most obvious is that you can jump out to interstellar space easily enough, but getting back in to a star system is going to be tough, because the gravity field there is so weak. Another is that accuracy in piloting and timing will be important (actually, given the distances involved and the accuracy required, ships might be lucky to hit their target star system at all) since errors in position, time, and velocity at jump activation will affect the jump vector. Ships with low acceleration will take longer to set themselves up for a jump, and a ship's FTL range will be limited to some extent by its delta-v capacity. It might make sense to make interstellar jumps from a star rather than a planet, both because you can get a stronger gravity field from a more massive object, and because the star's gravity field changes less with distance than a planet's does (well, only because you can't get that close to a star). Ships might make a short hop from a planet to the star, and then jump to the next star . . . or they might have to fall in toward the star both to use its gravity field for the jump AND to build up the necessary velocity.

 

This kind of a drive wouldn't really be suitable for a freewheeling space opera, where characters are expected to travel from place to place as easily as they might use an airplane.

[IndianaJoe3]

I had a thought about this once. Almost all fictional depictions of FTL drives require the ship to be away from gravity wells and massive objects. What if it were the other way around--what if a gravity well were required for a jump? After rolling that around in my head for a bit, I came up with the basic concept: the ship's jump is determined by the cross product of the local gravity and the ship's velocity relative to that gravity field, at the point in space and time when the jump drive is activated.

 

Interesting. A deeper gravity well implies the capacity for a longer jump. The super-massive black holes found in many galactic cores might allow for some really long jumps.

[Nolgroth]

This kind of a drive wouldn't really be suitable for a freewheeling space opera, where characters are expected to travel from place to place as easily as they might use an airplane.

 

Great! Now I have this vision of a star chart with lines being drawn in real time as the characters travel from system to system; all with the Indiana Jones theme bombastically playing.

[Christopher]

Interesting. A deeper gravity well implies the capacity for a longer jump. The super-massive black holes found in many galactic cores might allow for some really long jumps.

If you think about extra galactical, it might not be. There is only so close you can get to it without getting ripped appart. And even then the combination of time/space dilation and the general distance traveled might make hitting another galaxy suprisingly hard.

 

Of course it could be used to travel to any place inside the same galaxy relatively savely and quickly, as a sort of "rapid response".

 

It would mean that supermassive stars/normal black holes be very valuable real estate for travel purposes. Despite being absolutely terrible to live nearby, they might become the hubs.

 

And what about carrying massive gravity generators inside the ship (if artificial gravity is a thing) or on a space sation? Would that not too allow better traveling?

[csyphrett]

David Drake uses a drive that emulates sailing for his Leary books. The ship enters a space between universes and navigates using sightings on known stars. Sails are used to catch the radiation to push the ship forward. The only drawback depicted is after a few too many rides across this space in a short time, the crew starts having hallucinations.

CES 

[Cancer]

I had a thought about this once. Almost all fictional depictions of FTL drives require the ship to be away from gravity wells and massive objects. What if it were the other way around--what if a gravity well were required for a jump? After rolling that around in my head for a bit, I came up with the basic concept: the ship's jump is determined by the cross product of the local gravity and the ship's velocity relative to that gravity field, at the point in space and time when the jump drive is activated.

 

This has a few ramifications for travel. The most obvious is that you can jump out to interstellar space easily enough, but getting back in to a star system is going to be tough, because the gravity field there is so weak. Another is that accuracy in piloting and timing will be important (actually, given the distances involved and the accuracy required, ships might be lucky to hit their target star system at all) since errors in position, time, and velocity at jump activation will affect the jump vector. ...

Actually, it sets up star clusters as probable high-traffic targets. Increasing the space density of stars means you can be sloppier with your targeting and still have an acceptable chance of intersecting a gravity field strong enough to drop you back into normal space. Globular clusters have a higher density and larger star population than open clusters, and are visible from further away. Once upon a time it was taken for granted that there wouldn't be planets in globular clusters because of the lower heavy-element content in thsoe clusters, but there are exoplanets known in a globular or two now, so while that might be right it isn't an absolute on/off switch. Large, younger open clusters are also attractive as targets, if you're willing to put up with a higher supernova frequency nearby.

[Zeropoint]

I may not have been clear. In my proposed system, the distance of the jump is determined by the strength of the gravity well at the jump point and by the ship's velocity at the jump point; what's on the other end is irrelevant.

[Cancer]

Ah. That's quite different from what I thought. Hm.

[Lawnmower Boy]

I may not have been clear. In my proposed system, the distance of the jump is determined by the strength of the gravity well at the jump point and by the ship's velocity at the jump point; what's on the other end is irrelevant.

 

That's too bad. I was kind of taken by the image of a free port orbiting a galactic black hole (nice neighbourhood you've got here!), dealing with the occasional visitor popping in from a billion light years away. 

[Clonus]

I had a thought about this once. Almost all fictional depictions of FTL drives require the ship to be away from gravity wells and massive objects. What if it were the other way around--what if a gravity well were required for a jump? After rolling that around in my head for a bit, I came up with the basic concept: the ship's jump is determined by the cross product of the local gravity and the ship's velocity relative to that gravity field, at the point in space and time when the jump drive is activated.

 

In the book I just read ships actually have to enter the photosphere of a sun to get enough energy to jump and they come out in the photosphere of another sun.  

[L. Marcus]

Sounds risky.

[Hyper-Man]

How would you write this up in HERO?

 

 

HM

[Asperion]

Here is a good question: should the FTL drive be internal to the ship or external?

[Sundog]

I think that depends on what sort of effect you want. Stargates of some kind help restrict where people can be - you can't just grab a ship and go off into the uncharted reaches when the local mob or local law want your head. On the other hand, it also restricts some of the stories you can tell - unless your PCs are specialists in exploration employed to expand the network, you won't be able to run a "First Contact" scenario anywhere near as easily.

[L. Marcus]

How would you write this up in HERO?

 

 

HM

Extra-Dimensional Travel to a Universe where you are where you want to be. Fun side-effects.

[dmjalund]

Growth mega scale (universe size)

[Major Tom 2009]

In the only sci-fi campaign where I had a voice in the universe-building (as opposed to buying source material and using it as given), I use a "jump" drive, which is instantaneous for the ship and its occupants, but is extraordinarily disorienting to any mentality that experiences the jump while conscious (so most entities take a jump while sedated). This is the FTL drive mode in C J Cherryh's stories. My partner GM insisted on that flavor, though I was free to make up whatever fake physics I wanted.

 

... Which I did, of course, at far greater length than is needed for a game. I started by asserting the usual lethal consequences of activating the jump drive while in space with greater-than-tolerable curvature (which usually means too close to a stellar or planetary mass, but there are interesting exceptions to that). It also means you don't care about the actual contents of interstellar space, unless there happens to be a free-floating planet or other dark compact object near the geodesic (line of travel) you're following. We never invoked that problem though I did keep it as an ace in the hole for Evil GM purposes.

 

This finessed away the possibility of FTL ship-to-ship combat, but it means staying with known relativistic mechanics for in-system maneuvers and any ship-to-ship combat. This means the ship drives have make to kinetic energy at rates larger than planet Earth in CE 2010, that is, a ship drive has to have power of 10^15 W or greater. Some consequences of this can be handwaved away with mostly neutrino exhaust. Others cannot: you can accelerate small masses (has to be big enough to install a drive unit, which I declared to be a minimum of 5 tons or so) to relativistic speeds and you have a world-killing weapons system. There are ways to handle this, too.

 

Before I go much further into tl;dr land, I'll stop here.

 

If you have a copy of Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold (or can check out a copy of it from your local library), give Chapter 46

a close read; it has a description of how FTL drives can be used as weapons of planetary bombardment.

 

 

Major Tom 2009

[megaplayboy]

Psionic Hyperjump: Megascale Teleport, requires a skill roll AND an EGO roll, Side effects vary depending on how badly the roll(s) are failed(try not to think of the word "star", please!)

[Wardsman]

I'm thinking of megascale movement only usable with extra dimensional movement and based momentum going in.

In other words you shunt to a smaller space and your N-space drive gets you there.

[Wardsman]

If you have a copy of Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold (or can check out a copy of it from your local library), give Chapter 46

a close read; it has a description of how FTL drives can be used as weapons of planetary bombardment.

 

 

Major Tom 2009

 Yeah they are call relativistic kill weapons. not a new concept.

 

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4771ba89da222

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

[megaplayboy]

At "Oh My God particle" speed, relativistic mass is 300 billion times greater, so the kinetic energy of even a smallish object is potentially planet killing.